Weiner, Abedin, and Clinton

The Daily Mail is the publication that revealed in September Anthony Weiner's online sexting relatioship with a girl he knew was fifteen-years-old.

He told her he was 'hard'; that he 'would bust that tight p****'; sent her unclothed pictures; and told her he had rape fantasies about her. Wiener knew she was 15 - the girl had told him.

At the time of the sexts, Weiner was still married to Abedin - although he complained about their lack of a sex life to the girl - and caring for their son while she campaigned intensively for Clinton.

New York police and the FBI moved in on Weiner quickly after DailyMail.com's revelations - and it now transpires that when federal authorities investigated, they took the former couple's shared laptop. It is unclear if they also took mobile devices.

In fact Abedin, 40, was already separated from Weiner, 52, by the time the FBI moved in, as she had announced the end of their marriage in August, when he was hit by another sexting scandal.


Sexting: The 15-year-old girl who DailyMail.com revealed had received sexually-charged messages from Weiner, with her father

The former couple are assumed to have started the task of unraveling their life together, but then, in September, came a bombshell which put the past sexting in the shade: DailyMail.com's revelations of sexual messages and pictures to a 15-year-old girl - at a time when he was married to Abedin.

He carried on a months-long online sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl during which,she said, he asked her to dress up in 'school-girl' outfits for him on a video messaging application and pressed her to engage in 'rape fantasies'.

The girl, whose name is still being withheld by DailyMail.com because she is a minor, said the online relationship began last January while she was a high school sophomore.

Weiner was aware that the girl was underage, according to DailyMail.com interviews with the girl and her father, as well as a cache of online messages.

This time Weiner was T-Dog - and an avid user of the sort of instant messaging technology which does not leave a trail. Precisely the sort of technology Clinton had once joked she liked, in the wake of her email scandal emerging.

In Clintonworld, there was no comment, and although Abedin was not on the trail in the immediate aftermath of the story, she was soon back at Clinton's side.

She may have thought that ending the marriage would keep her safe from the fallout from the revelations.
But on Friday she learned that Weiner's fallout is now a danger not just to her - but to Clinton herself.

The FBI had long since said that Clinton - and by extension Abedin - would not be prosecuted for their handling of classified information on the secret email server when an entirely different investigation was launched, this time into the sexting.

What became clear within hours of the dramatic announcement by the FBI Director James Comey on Friday morning that there were new emails relevant to the investigation was where they came from: either Abedin or Weiner's devices.
Both, a New York Times report made clear, had been taken by the FBI in the course of their investigation - and the new material was found.

Read more here.

Sexting scandal in Colorado

Although I live in Colorado, I missed this story. Jazz Shaw wrote at Hot Air on November 7,

The disturbing news coming out of Canon City High School in Colorado is troubling without a doubt, but the school and governmental response may be nearly as bad. For those of you who may have missed the non-stop cable news coverage of the breaking story, officials at the high school have discovered what is being described as a massive sexting ring involving more than one hundred students, some ranging in age down to 12 year olds in middle school. The big questions now are focused on what to do about it and whether any of this constitutes a federal crime. (Yahoo News)

A massive sexting ring is rocking a high school in Colorado, with at least 100 students trading nude pictures and posting them on social media, news reports said.

Some of the kids in the photographs were as young as 12, and included eighth graders from the middle school, The New York Times reported.

The students, many of whom are on the football team at Canon City High School, could now face criminal charges, reports said.

The school district announced Wednesday that “a number of our students have engaged in behavior where they take and pass along pictures of themselves that expose private parts of their bodies or their undergarments.”

So far, the only concrete action being taken has been to cancel the school’s final football game of the year since it seems that the better part of the team will probably be suspended anyway. But the “ring” of illicit activity goes far, far beyond just the locker room of the football squad. Previous efforts to “educate” students about the dangers of sexting seem to have not sunk in very well, at least in this school system. The established fact is that these photos, once uploaded to “the cloud” from a phone, live forever on the web and most of them are probably already being downloaded in mass from sites that traffic in child pornography for pedophiles. Further, surely these teens have been told that if their names are attached to the phone, the pictures will come back to haunt them in their adult years.

And how did the students respond? By installing apps known as “phone vaults” which hide their pictures from the prying eyes of parents or teachers who might get hold of the phone, making them look like some simple calculator app. (There are apparently armies of people out there cooking up phone apps that I’ve never heard of.) They obviously heard the message and knew they weren’t supposed to be doing it, but that didn’t stop huge numbers of them from exchanging naughty pictures anyway.

So what’s to be done? Officials are now examining whether or not anyone should be prosecuted under federal child pornography charges. I’m not saying we should do nothing, but doesn’t that seem not only a bit extreme but misguided in terms of the original intent of the laws in question? We have those protections in place to stop sick, twisted adults from exploiting children and trafficking in such materials. These are kids who are foolishly producing the “product” themselves and sending it around their own peer group. There may be something illegal about it when children do it among and between themselves, but as creepy as it all sounds I’m not sure exactly what sort of criminal proceeding – if any – is appropriate here.

Short of that, what are we to do? Do we simply ban children under 18 from bringing phones to school? On a gut reaction level I’m actually all for that because those phones must be a huge distraction from school work and likely cause more problems than they solve. But at the same time, mobile phone technology not only exists but it’s pervasive in our society. That genie is already out of the bottle. And even if we banned the phones at school that wouldn’t stop the kids from taking nude pics off school grounds and exchanging them anyway.

The real failure here is not one of technology nor even of the schools, really. This is a societal failure which lands in the laps of the parents who failed to instill proper values in their kids and didn’t educate them about the horrible position they were putting themselves in. I hate to wave the white flag, but this doesn’t sound like a problem that government, or even law enforcement can fix. A lot of teenagers probably shouldn’t even have phones, but that’s up to their mothers and fathers to decide, not the schools or the cops. Of course, we’re fighting against something as old as time… the titillating allure of all things sexual to younger kids who are just waking up to their own sexuality in a cultured steeped in erotic imagery and messages. That’s probably too big of a battle for anyone to win. In the meantime, I think all we can do is keep trying to drill home the message to parents and get them to beat the message (figuratively) into their own kids. Show them the stories of young women – because it’s almost always the girls – who have had their lives and careers wrecked by having such pictures surface when they’re applying for college or a job. You won’t reach all of them, but this school is a clear signal that we need to be reaching a lot more of them then we are currently.

Destroying the lives of young people

Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic,

It is extremely common for American teenagers to text one another naked photographs. Much less frequently, they get caught. If they’re discovered by a parent or teacher, they might get off with a stern lecture or a suspension from school. In an alarming number of cases, however, adult strangers get ahold of the images and proceed to systematically destroy the lives of the young people involved.

These destroyers are neither child pornographers nor pedophiles nor blackmailers. They are representatives of the criminal-justice system: police officers, prosecutors, and judges, often well-meaning, who prosecute kids as felonious sex-criminals, sometimes putting them on sex-offender registries for life.

...The result in many states is that it’s perfectly legal for two 17-year-olds to engage daily in unprotected sex with one another, but criminal for them to have a relationship in which they abstain from sex—but trade naked photographs.

...If it’s legal to have sex with an individual, it should be legal to consensually share explicit images with them.

Read more here.